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Unfortunately, there's a lot about Hummingbird we don't know right now. I think Danny Sullivan's FAQ piece is the closest we have to reliable information, but that still leaves a lot of holes: FAQ: All About The New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm Google claims that Hummingbird is a substantial rewrite of the core algorithm (more than just your typical update), and yet we haven't seen large-scale movements on many client rankings. So, what's going on? A couple of things, I think: (1) As Peter said (and this seems to be pretty well confirmed), Hummingbird changes how Google interprets some queries, especially natural language queries, and attempts to find relevant results based on a more complex, semantic analysis of phrases, and not just keyword matching. It's unclear how this practically impacts your average query today (especially head terms and the "chunky middle"), but as voice-based searches become more common and people get used to natural language queries, the impact will increase over time. (2) Hummingbird seems to have increased Google's ability to use historical information to personalize queries. This extends a long-term evolution and means that any given person might see a different result for an ambiguous query based on previous queries. Even now, searches like "weather" bring up local information, whereas they used to bring up generic information (like weather sites). Practically, we're not seeing this personalization impact affect a ton of queries yet, but we will over time. There are ways to check ranking using context and limited personalization, but it's technically very difficult. This is certainly a concern for rank-tracking tools, including ours (and something we're thinking about even now). (3) Finally, I suspect Hummingbird laid the groundwork for an expansion of Knowledge Graph, not only in its pairing to more queries, but in how Google extracts data from the index to create answers. I'm seeing many examples in testing where Google is pulling answer-like information from websites beyond its current data partners. This is speculation, and it may not be connected to Hummingbird, but these changes are definitely coming. (1) and (2) impact rank-tracking directly, whereas (3) impacts how we view ranking and signals the need to go beyond just counting blue links. We take both trends seriously, but getting from here to there is a gradual process, not just for technical reasons, but because our mindset as SEOs has to evolve. From a competitive standpoint, you won't see huge changes in the short term. If a change impacts any given query, that impact is felt for both you and your competitors, in most cases. There may be isolated examples where a re-interpretation of a query means that you or your competitor rise or fall in ranking relative to the other, but our tools would see that and I expect that's a relatively small amount of searches right now. At this point, we're keeping our eyes open and trying to predict where Google is headed. Now that Moz Analytics is launched, we're working hard to be more agile and iterate new functions in smaller chunks and at a faster pace.

If you can give us some context as to where you've seen it used, we can help better explain what it means in that case. It could actually mean a lot of different things.

There is also information on internal links in Google Webmaster Tools; under "Search Traffic" in the left column, choose "Internal Links."

Thanks for that David, it def helped. Awesome!

Hi Fabio They are not harmful and you can leave them. FYI, there is something called a "find and replace" which you could do in a few ways to remove the unwanted code; you can move your HTML text to a text editor like Text Wrangler, do a find and replace and move the HTML back to WordPress. you can use something like this plugin http://wordpress.org/plugins/search-and-replace/ which should work well within wordpress. As noted, it's not harmful, but if you ever did need to remove lots of text at once, that would be the way to do it. -Dan

Page rank seems to be fading out am I safe to stay with PA and DA metrics instead? You should be for now but look across multiple metrics as leaning on one too much can give you false ideas. Worse case you can always use your Serp pos. but PA & DA are always a safe bet. I don't agree with link building tactics and feel that it should more a networking activity to provide USEFUL links to users... am I being too white hat and missing opporunities? Sounds great to me and good for a long term SEO tactic you may miss out short term but in long term which is always nicer your safe. If it benefits the user I recommend it! The other company have promised long list of links including 100 SEO friendly web directory listings, - can any one say Penguin 2.1? 200 PR 8 back links from Pinterest (which i thought was no follow) Pintrest links are follow & 10 long lasting and high quality mini web sites (with three pages/posts, video and pictures). Am I right that this all sounds a little spammy or is this really what I should be doing for me clients? It is a little spammy but unfortunately it can work but it would work short term and only be a quick fix. I wouldn't recommend this as a service Your tactics sound fine to me keep it white hat and keep on the ball whilst spamming micro sites and directories seem great Google is always trying to stamp this kind of manipulation out and rather then fight Google why not go with it? create some content users want to naturally share and talk about etc. It's a longer benefit for everyone to have great content on your site that makes people want to go to your site rather than cheat them onto your site where at the end of the day may just result in a bounce. Of course your welcome to look into it more and that's all opinion but content is king for most SEO practices Thanks & good luck.

I'd just use Webmaster tools for something like this. you can export the spreadsheet and if you don't have a keyword listed, you're either not ranking anywhere that matters or there is no traffic the that KW anyways.

Hi David, I'm looking at your profile, and see you do have a paid account (you can't ask a question in Q&A without having a paid account or 500 MozPoints). Sending an email to help@moz.com or visiting the Help Contact page at http://moz.com/help/contact is the best way to get in touch with us. Keri

Many thanks, that is what I have been trying to explain to the client but they really are concerned about the penalty even though I can not see any evidence of it. I am in the process of sorting out the their blog and a useful guide area so this will really help my argument.

I have the same problem In my moz analytics, but with canonical tag set. I think the moz analytics should detect when a canonical tag is set and ignore the 'sortby, datecut, order' and other inputs, as duplicate contents.

Like what Federico said it takes time for these pages to get found and indexed. Moz's isn't able to index the web at the level that Google is able to. So just because it's not showing up in Moz yet doesn't mean that Google hasn't found and indexed it yet. Other ways that you can monitor inbound links: Set up alerts with Google Alerts & TalkWalker.com Check referrals in Google Analytics, new referrals sources could be from other sites linking to you. Other backlink checkers that you could check, besides OSE, ahrefs & majestic seo Hope this answers your question.

Have you checked out the Moz API? Here is the section on Link Metrics which might help you. Hope this helps. Mike

Hello Peter Recenty Rand wrote a White board Friday on moz blog(actually a video)   It cleaned up some questions in our minds about Not provided data, if you havent watched it. here is the link for it http://moz.com/blog/100-percent-keyword-not-provided-whiteboard-tuesday   seems like in all cases getting information is costly and information is not gonna be that available or accurate soon (already percentage went up:(. Frutiko Team

Thanks Vadim! I'm familiar with the seogadget tool. I was hoping there were some other solutions out there. Netpeak with Paralells isn't a bad idea.

The first thing I would do is download the crawl report as an excel sheet.  You can do this from your crawl report page. From there, sort by the 404 error column, bringing "True" to the top.  The top of the list is now the broken URL's.  One of the very last columns on the right is the "referrer" column.  This will show you the page where Roger is getting the bad link from. Make Sense?

Thanks for helping out! I have a feeling she meant "ranking" as in position in SERPs, not "PageRank" - caught myself making that semantic error a few times

SEMRush shows wrong organic traffic data when i go for my website it shows 20% of my actual google organic traffic

I got by # of visits, interaction on the site + and on its social network sites - by both themselves and by readers/visitors. and how often the blog or resources are updated.

There's a smaller list in the Google doc mentioned in this post - http://moz.com/blog/web-directory-submission-danger 

Awesome that's it